Jesse Andriesse 18-09-2002, Leeuwarden
Growing up, there would always be a newspaper lying around my childhood home. The newspaper would fall onto our doormat from Monday to Saturday every week. Sometimes if I would find it lying on the table with a pen nearby, I would start drawing moustache's and bunny ears on the images of people. At that time, the people on the print were unknown to me. This early encounter with news media has become a touchstone for me. I have become keenly interested in my relationship to news media. I wonder, in what ways can we respond to the constant flow of information?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started developing an obsessive habit of doom-scrolling and constantly refreshing the news apps on my phone. The obsessive habit developed shortly before starting my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie four years ago. The doom-scrolling has on many occasions found its way into my artworks. In the past four years of my studies, crisis followed crisis and I could not look away. Making artwork has often helped me process and deal with the flow of information from the news. I became fascinated by the recurring symbols, objects, gestures, rituals and relationships in the news media’s output: the awkward moments that occur when politicians shake hands, the shape and form of lecterns, the industrial landscapes, the assemblages of many microphones recording the exact same audio, etc.
Most of all, I am interested in the news media’s portrayal of politics. My fascination for politics is nothing new. From an early age, my curiosity has led me to take on the roles of activist, party member and election candidate. In recent years I noticed myself contemplating these various roles, I had become less interested in the contents of politics, taking a more observant role. I see the documentation of politics often happening in staged environments. The reoccurring elements that make up these stages are all meant to uphold a smooth surface. The stages on which politics is presented to the public, tend to feel distant from my lived reality. Through recreating, tracing and installing these elements in other contexts, I attempt to disrupt the smooth surface, show the imperfections within the surface and bridge some of the distance to the stage.
Email: jesseandriesse☆icloud.comInstagram: @zwarelente